To this day, even as a twentysomething young black man who has felt the sting of racism and witnessed firsthand its effects on how we relate to one another as humans, Marcell still can’t wrap his mind around someone hating him because of the color of his skin. It really messes with his mind because he’s spent his lifetime surrounded by a virtual United Nations of friends from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds and has always embraced them for who they are, what they’re interested in, and whether they have an intimate human-to-human connection, rather than what they look like. Indeed, his best friend growing up was a French boy named Anton, whom he adored not because of his skin color or background, but because they liked the same things: video games and climbing trees in the backyard and riding bicycles with the wind whipping in their faces. This is Marcell’s way. The way it should be.
We mothers, the ones charged with the care and upkeep of black boys, know the score. Black single moms are constantly beat up for our choice to have our children, but it is our boys who feel the impact of that blunt force. The blows come wrapped in a sledgehammer of statistics and pathology, with society tying our sons’ skin color and the marital status of their mothers to a heavy weight of low expectations. It seems as though everybody is standing around waiting for our boys to prove that black boys, especially those raised by single moms, have a propensity for violence, are probable criminals, lack education, are more likely to take illicit drugs, and are more likely to suffer from mental disorders—and on and on. From the moment the doctor smacked Marcell’s butt and said, “It’s a boy,” I knew I had to come primed and ready for the fight. I was never scared of the prospects—never bowed to the fear that comes with raising a black son in a society that is prone to think the worst, rather than the best, of him. Instead, I steeled myself for the challenge, with this one true mantra: “I’m going to raise a helluva black boy.” That’s the armor I carried with me—the determination to prove every last one of those statistics wrong. I was blocking bullets aimed at my son’s abilities and character early and often. Like the time when his third-grade teacher suggested I put him on medication because she thought he was too hyper in class. I saw nothing wrong; as far as I was concerned, my son’s behavior was no different from any other creative, inquisitive, and energetic eight-year-old boy who would much rather jump around and be stimulated than be confined to the same seat for hours on end, stuck in the muck of long, boring lectures and tedious assignments that felt more like busywork than actual learning. When she mentioned attention deficit disorder and slow-tracking my kid, I gave myself two choices: either choke her out or pull my son out of the school. Thankfully for her, I chose the latter.
Near the end of eighth grade Marcell learned firsthand how his skin color made some people unfairly perceive him as hostile. That happened when he was called into the office for throwing down a Ping-Pong paddle in a fit of anger over losing a match. The paddle popped up and accidentally hit a fellow classmate. Granted, Marcell did start to have a little temper around that time, but it was the product of adolescence and hormones, added to which was an undercurrent of hostility he was facing from his teachers and especially his peers, not some kind of academic or emotional deficiency. He had kids calling him the N-word, walking up to him and addressing him in Ebonics—“Yo, yo, yo, Marcell, what up!”—as if my son didn’t have a command over the English language, and even asking him, conspiratorially, if he ate fried chicken and drank grape Kool-Aid.
“What are you even talking about?” Marcell would snap. “My mother doesn’t cook fried chicken; it’s high in cholesterol and it’ll kill you. And I’ve never had Kool-Aid in my life.”
Unbeknownst to me, he was dealing with this day in and day out at that school, though I wouldn’t find out until years later. Only then did I understand that this kind of attitude was why he wanted to leave one particular school. When he was in the thick of it, however, he would simply tell me he didn’t like the school, which, to my ears, translated into “I don’t like school.”
“Boy, just focus and get your head in them books,” I would say, dismissing his complaints. “You can do this.” Frankly, I wanted the school to work; as an institution, it was academically sound, plus he had solid connections there, including a pair of Armenian brothers he really liked to hang out with, and Ian, the son of my fellow actress Regina King, whom he counted as a good friend. I thought he was doing just fine.
Then I got that phone call from the teacher that would make me understand just what kind of danger my son was in.
“He was a preemie, so that might have something to do with his abilities,” the teacher said nonchalantly one afternoon when I was called up to the school to talk about Marcell’s yearly assessment. She actually suggested that my son wouldn’t be able to test into a high-performing private high school and proposed that rather than let him graduate, I should approve leaving him back a year at her school. “If we keep him back a year, he can catch up.”
“Well, is he failing?” I asked, my forehead pulsing with anger. I knew the answer, and whatever she was going to say didn’t matter; I was too disgusted to bother hearing and digesting the words. I just wanted to see her fix her mouth to give me her reasoning for holding back a child who was passing all his classes. The very second sound came out of her mouth, I cut her off. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter what you say to me right now. I’ll be taking my son out of this school,” I said.
“Oh? What school do you have in mind for him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I ticked off a list of considerations and mentioned a private school that was looking to up its diversity and had a new coach who was recruiting players for the school’s basketball team. One of my closest friends in the business, Lisa Vidal, who plays Kara on the hit BET show Being Mary Jane, had nothing but good things to say about the school. That’s where Marcell would go next—somewhere where he was wanted.